Programming Test

Certainly! Below is a Python function `is_palindrome(s)` that checks whether the input string `s` is a palindrome. A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequences of characters that reads the same forward and backward (ignoring spaces, punctuation, and capitalization). ```python def is_palindrome(s): # Normalize the string by converting it to lowercase and removing non-alphanumeric characters s = ''.join(char.lower() for char in s if char.isalnum()) # Check if the string reads the same forwards and backwards return s == s[::-1] # Test case test_string = "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" print(is_palindrome(test_string)) # Expected output: True ``` Explanation: 1. The function first normalizes the input string `s` by converting all characters to lowercase and filtering out non-alphanumeric characters (spaces, punctuation, etc.). This is done using a list comprehension combined with `str.join()`, `str.lower()`, and `str.isalnum()`. 2. It then checks if the normalized string reads the same forwards and backwards by comparing it to its reverse (`s[::-1]`). 3. The function returns `True` if `s` is a palindrome, otherwise `False`. The provided test case checks the classic example of a palindrome: "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama", which should return `True`.